Under which conditions is nuking a city any more or less a horrific warcrime than the destruction of city via HE and incendiary bombs?
Recall that 72 Japanese cities, including Tokyo, were destroyed prior to Hiroshima, which was on a target list to be destroyed whether by atomic or conventional means already.
Most war criminals don't get meaningfully prosecuted, victor or defeated.
International law is more of a series of suggestions and norms than an actual set of codes one must operate by lest they spend time in prison. Nations have the ability to dodge them, so they do. It's that way from war crimes to counterfeiting to freedom of navigation on the high seas.
Is it right? No. Should we do better? Yeah. Is rehashing something that happened in 1945 going to do anything for today? Not at all, unless we're going to start rehashing other things along the way, like the status of Imperial Japanese commanders in war dead shrines and a lot of other things.
No, the firebombing of cities (e.g. Dresden, Tokyo) and the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not legally considered war crimes under international law as it stood, which is why they could not have been and were not prosecuted.
What's the moral lesson: if we have a WW3, don't target civilians? What if our enemies are doing exactly that without compunction? What if civilians and military infrastructure are colocated? What if those civilians simply want us all to die and will work to any ends for that result (e.g. they may have been effectively brainwashed as the allies were indeed preparing for with Japan)?
It's not that the answers are morally good, but rather if you're already in a world war then the ethical part (diplomacy) has already failed and it's just going to be the degree of horrific things, not their absence, that we have to plan for.
Targeting civilians is a war crime. No excuse for that.
Targeting civilians in places like Tokyo or Dresden didn't even help the war cause much. The Soviet Union defeated the Nazis without mass bombings of German cities.
Yes war is the supreme crime and what we should avoid in the first place. Still there are different ways you can conduct war.
A nuclear exchange would necessarily target civilians and be unlike anything before in history. It's a nightmare scenario that has to be opposed at all cost.
Unfortunately in total war situations the line between civilian and not is blurred and not just blurred by the aggressor (as a sibling comment has pointed out). That doesn't really justify anything though, I agree, and something like a nuclear war targeting civilians is just terminal for civilisation.
>The Soviet Union defeated the Nazis without mass bombings of German cities.
You're reading from a curiously misinformed understanding of history. The USSR defeated the Nazis by killing millions of them while also burning, bombarding and destroying their cities and anything else in its way en masse during a ferociously bloody campaign of revenge mixed with genuine military imperatives. Soviet soldiers also committed what are probably some of the biggest mass rape epidemics in modern history against their German enemy's women once they entered their territory. This in particular was immaterial to Soviet victory and not an official Soviet policy, but I mention it to underscore that there was absolutely no shortage of war crime-worthy targeting of civilians in many ways, and on a colossal scale by the Soviets too.
Read about the invasion and ethnic cleansing of East Prussia if you like. At least couple hundred thousand German civilians died as a result of that alone. None of this at all compares to what the Nazis did during their eastern conquests of course, but while a war crime is a war crime, degrees exist. Thus, it's not surprising if allied moral and military conduct was on a very long leash given such extremely savage enemies as Germany and Imperial Japan.
> The Soviet Union defeated the Nazis without mass bombings of German cities.
In our shared reality(?) the Soviet Union defeated the Nazi's in parallel with the mass bombing of industrial areas, factories, ports, dams, and general war making infrastructure, much of which was within German cities.
The Soviet Union defeated an increasingly under supplied resource starved German military.
There is a paradox called “logical insanity.” The novel Catch 22 deals with this irony: basically, the idea was that the war was killing thousands daily, so in order to end it as fast as possible, they planned to be as brutal as possible. But what were alternatives?
Drop the bomb somewhere 'harmless': how would that convince the War Cabinet of anything? The point of all weapons is to harm to convince the enemy to stop and re-evaluate their costs.
Blockade and starve the Japanese out? Possibly millions dead. Invasion? The Japanese leadership thought that up to 20M of their own people would perish trying to repel the US landings.
And that's just the Japanese numbers: what about all the peoples that were still living under Japanese rule in Manchuria, Korea, etc?
And what about the American lives, which were Truman et al's first responsibility?
If you're going to rip off one of Dan Carlin's show titles this way, be so courteous as to provide the reference. It's pretty good, as so is a lot of his stuff, him hailing from back when podcasts were still delivered synchronously via terrestrial broadcast.
No, but interestingly at least one case of Allies doing a 'war crime' was used as a defense in the Nuremberg Trials; Karl Dönitz was convicted of unrestricted Submarine warfare, however since both Britain and the US were doing the same, they more or less let it slide.
When the alternatives of nationalism are to fight to the very last man, and cause 8 times the number of casualties. ( Perhaps somewhat more...). Hirohito knew that the military was going to do that.
One thing that's rarely considered is that by any metric Japan had already lost the war.
And what's interesting - and definitive - about both Japan and Germany is that the regimes kept fighting when this was obvious.
There was plenty of insanity to go around, but it takes an extra special kind of insanity to ignore defeat when outmatched by a superior force, and when continuing to fight will cause massive casualties for your own population when failure is already guaranteed.
This isn't just irrational, it's compulsively self-harming.
At the same time it's recognised now that Germany and Japan both had very limited prospects of victory in WWII. There were voices in the military in both countries making this point before the fighting started. But the regimes chose irrational violence for irrational ends, with horrific self-destructive consequences.
What killed millions wasn't the weapons, it was the culture of mass delusion that made the weapons necessary.
It's the nature of authoritarianism to deny reality until pushed into collapse.
That's the only real enemy in war, and we're still fighting it today - unsuccessfully.
>At the same time it's recognised now that Germany and Japan both had very limited prospects of victory in WWII.
I'd beg to differ about this being widely recognized. For Japan perhaps, but even they could have considerably forestalled their eventual defeat if they'd done a few logical things better, or won the battle of Midway (which they should have won numerically and tactically, if they'd been a bit more careful with their encryption and estimation of U.S naval force disposition), or prioritized their targets at Pearl Harbour more carefully, or maybe better, not even bothered to attack it in the first place while performing the rest of their conquest of Asia.
As for Germany, it could have outright won the war. No debate at this point has settled that this isn't so. Indeed, at several key points Germany emphatically had both means and opportunity to secure its total hegemony at least over Europe and its surroundings in a way that would have resulted in a Nazi-version alternative to the dual superpower bipolar world that instead existed between the USSR and USA after 1945.
Fortunately this didn't happen, since as bad as the USSR was (especially under Stalin) I'd hate to imagine an alternative in which the other hegemonic nuclear power is one built on the even more murderously fanatical legacy of Hitler, Himmler or Heydrich and the rest.
> You are saying the responsibility for the instant incineration of hundreds of thousands of civilians lies with the bombed, and not the bomber?
The Japanese leadership knew they could not win the war for about a year before the bombings. Yet they chose to continue the war regardless of the suffering it caused their own people.
Was the US supposed to give up?
Would it been okay if Germany was allowed to surrender on the following conditions:
* Hitler stayed in power
* the Nazis stayed in power
* all land conquered by Germany was kept by Germany
* any allegations of war crimes would be handled internally by the Germans themselves
Because those were the terms Japan was waiting for:
* Emporer stayed in power
* the government stayed in power
* all land conquered by Japan was kept by Japan
* any allegations of war crimes would be handled internally by the Japanese themselves
Would you have been okay with WW2 ending against either party on those terms?
When the bombed is credibly threatening to essentially suicide its entire citizenry despite no chance of victory, then yes, the rules of war must necessarily be relaxed to achieve the greater good. I would argue that the WW2 Imperial Japanese situation was unique in a way that nations had not yet had to deal with in the modern era (and haven’t had to deal with since).
Throwing around these terms without understanding, how and why they apply is foolhardy. The use of nuclear weapons is not explicitly prohibited under current international law, and is not automatically classified as a war crime per se. Their use could constitute a war crime depending on the circumstances, especially if they violate core principles of international humanitarian law (IHL).
Is it the means (atomic bomb) or the destruction that raise that question for you?
Tokyo had a higher death toll from conventional bombing and incendiaries, and Dresden raised the question of whether destruction of a city was justified.
Japan had 72 cities destroyed prior to Hiroshima, which was on the "to be destroyed" list before the wider military outside of the Manhattan project knew of the atomic bomb.
The only conceivable (and highly hypothetical) way a nuclear detonation over a city might not violate IHL would require a very narrow set of improbable conditions, which are highly theoretical and borderline implausible in reality.
Empty city scenario:
The city is completely evacuated (e.g. warning issued and civilians withdrawn). The target is a purely military installation (e.g. underground command center, missile base). A low-yield nuclear weapon is used with tightly controlled fallout and blast effects.
Extremis Self-Defense:
The attacking state faces an existential threat (e.g. imminent nuclear attack from another state). A nuclear weapon is used as a last resort, targeting a high-value military asset in a city. The attacker argues that this was the only available means to defend itself.
Hypothetical “Clean” Nuclear Technology:
Some future nuclear weapon is designed with minimal blast, heat, and no residual radiation. It targets a completely isolated, fortified military position within a city. Civilians have been evacuated, and the use is precisely calibrated to avoid harm.
But this is where the fantasy ends. Cities are full of civilians. Nuclear weapons cannot distinguish civilian from combatant. Blast radius, thermal radiation, EMP, and fallout affect vast areas, even with “low-yield” weapons. Hospitals, schools, water systems, food supply chains would all be devastated. Environmental destruction and long-term radiation would cause unnecessary suffering.
The attack would likely violate the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks, the principle of proportionality, and environmental protections (under Additional Protocol I).
Burning entire cities to the ground and immolating their inhabitants was common practice at the time. Doing that with a single bomb simply made the process more efficient. They had not yet had time to start thinking of atomic power as something fundamentally different from what had come before: there were only three weeks between the Trinity test and the bombing of Hiroshima.
> How could detonating a nuke over a city not violate humanitarian law … ?
Would you rather have millions of Japanese die—either from trying to repel a US landing or through starvation if a blockade was enact—or 'just' a few hundred thousand?
The atomic bomb was strangely the most humane way, that probably saved the most Japanese lives, of ending the war.
It definitely is a warcrime, but just about every major battle in WWII is a war-crime by modern standards. The concept of warcrimes exists largely because we don't ever want WWII to happen again. Before that there were geneva conventions which defined war crimes but they were far more limited to the extent that even the Nazis were able to come up with supposed justifications for much of what they did based around [according to them, at least] their having not violated the geneva conventions which existed at the time.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined weren't even the biggest war crimes committed by America against the Japanese. I'm avoiding mentioning war-crimes committed by the other side because I don't want to inadvertently make the fallacious argument that they would somehow justify the war crimes we committed, but the argument I do want to make is that these sorts of arguments should be based around who was killed.
Torture is an exception to this because it implies the deliberate infliction of more pain than is necessary to kill the victim, but these sorts of discussions should never be based around the choice of weapon. When I see people constantly criticize the atomic bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki at a far greater rate than similar-scale events such as the repeated firebombings of tokyo or even "normal" battles with massive collateral damage such as Okinawa or Berlin it seems to me that the implication is that you would've been fine with America killing 250k people as long as we had done so with conventional weapons.
Never. They could have blockaded Japan. They could have negotiated with the Russians, as at the time they were “sharing” Germany and were more or less on the same side. They could even just go home, Japan was already no military threat after the horrific fire bombing. The fact that they chose to do the unthinkable, and that Americans defend that decision to this day, goes to show what kind of people they really are. They only seek peace and diplomacy when it’s other people’s wars.
The Soviets would almost certainly have taken Berlin either way, given they were fighting 80% of the Nazi Army, while all of the Western Front was concerned only with the "minor" side. Thinking America saved Europe in WWII is one of the many misconceptions perpetuated to this day about the War.
Well if all that counts is who's fighting >= 51% of the Axis, then you have to take into consideration that the USSR didn't even join the Asian theater until the day after Hiroshima happened despite sharing a border with Imperial Japan and having struggled through a brutal war of attrition with the Japanese just a couple decades earlier.
This idea you and many other armchair historians have that the USSR can solo 1v1 the axis powers and win isn't any less naive than saying America saved Europe, because it ignores the significant amounts of foreign aid that the US donated to other allied nations. This includes the USSR, who would not have been able to carry out a successful war of attrition against the Germans without a consistent pipeline of supplies and weapons. It certainly would not have been able to win a war on two fronts if the Japanese felt free to invade the soviet far east. I will concede that the Chinese deserve way more credit than they generally get for waging their own war of attrition against the Japanese which prevented them from going to war in the soviet far east, but that was also made possible with significant American logistical support.
But more importantly, you seem to have an oddly eurocentric view of history in which the european theater is the only one of any import. Japan's eventual defeat was never a foregone conclusion, and they were just as cruel to their conquered foes as the Germans were. They were also the only Axis that posed a credible threat to the United States, having successfully established a foothold in the Aleutian Islands with an aim towards invading Canada and the United States. Realistically I don't think it ever would have worked (again, they were pre-occupied with China) but they certainly have a better track record of attacking the North American continent than the krauts ever did.
